Kiss Tomorrow Goodbye (5 page)

‘Monteagle Street…’ the driver was calling.

I folded the newspaper and got off the bus. This was a residential section but it wouldn’t be for long. There were a few old houses still standing on Monteagle Street, two and three-story gingerbread houses, eroding rococo rocks in a swelling ocean of business buildings. There was a lot of traffic, and filling stations and parking lots were all over the neighborhood. Down the street, half a block from the corner, there was an enormous excavation, and the smooth exhausts of the steam shovels floated in scrupulous unbroken lines of sound, each having the same content and each in precisely the same key. The Marakeesh Apartments were on the corner where the bus had stopped, a two-story brick building that looked cheap and rundown, as if what went on inside was exactly what you suspected.

I went in. There was a small lobby and a desk and a switchboard. I went on down the hall to one, one, four and thumped on the door with my index finger. Holiday opened the door and I went inside. Before I had time to say anything, to look around, to even put down the newspaper I was carrying, she grabbed me around the neck, kicking the door shut with her foot, putting her face up to mine, baring her teeth. I kissed her, but not as hard as she kissed me, and then I saw that she was wearing only a light flannel wrapper, unbuttoned all the way down. I had the impression that her breasts were small and hard and firm, but they were not in focus; I was looking at that Eldorado again, and hearing all of Bach essenced into one single wondrous note. I quivered, holding her tightly; and she bared her teeth wider and started nipping at my ear, breathing loudly, like the early fall winds which used to roar down from the Great Smokies, through Vaughan’s Cap and on to Knoxville, which was at the end of the world. I tilted my head a little, moving my ear away from her teeth, thinking above the moaning of the strings of the corpora cavernosa that this was the time to stop this, this was the time to stop this, this was the time to stop this, but they were only streaks of thought and moving much too rapidly to translate into action. And then I realized that she had me by the hand and was pulling me towards the bedroom…

I was asleep, of course, but even when you are asleep you possess a kind of propliopithecustian awareness that enables you to know and very acutely feel certain things. I knew that I was warm and comfortable and safe. Several times this awareness began to fade and I realized that waking was approaching, but I could do nothing about it because to rouse my will to fight it would surely have speeded consciousness. All I could do was try to slide back, but this was impossible and the world-noises crept through and slowly filled the room and when I finally was able to identify the dominant ones they were the damp-sounding exhausts of the steam shovel down the street and I opened my eyes and looked around. The shades were drawn but there was a small hole in one that the sunlight had found and was coming through, a thin golden wire, rich and alive and containing the quality of color that belongs only to the late afternoon. So it was late afternoon. I lay there listening for some movement that would tell me where Holiday was, but I heard nothing.

I got up, crawling under that living wire of sunlight, and opened the door, looking into the living-room. It was empty of everything except the cheap furniture. I went across the living-room to another door that was not quite closed and pushed it open. This was a small kitchen and it was empty too. As I started back to the bedroom the hall door opened and Holiday came in. She was wearing a grey woolen skirt, a white shirt and a green checkered coat and had a manila shopping bag in her hand. When she saw me she smiled.

‘Aren’t you afraid you’ll catch cold?’ she said.

I looked down at myself and discovered that I was naked.

‘I just this minute got up,’ I said. ‘I was looking for you.’

‘I been to market,’ she said. ‘Jinx phoned. He’s coming for dinner.’

I was glad of that. I wanted to talk a little business with Jinx.

‘How do you expect me to keep my mind on the dinner with you standing around like that?’ she asked. ‘Why don’t you put on some clothes?’

‘I will,’ I said.

She went into the kitchen and I went into the bedroom and put on a pair of shorts and joined her. She was emptying the shopping bag, but she paused long enough to look at me and say, ‘That’s much better,’ and went on emptying the bag.

‘You like mushroom soup?’ she asked, holding up a can of mushroom soup.

‘I like anything,’ I said. ‘As my grandfather used to say, I’m so hungry I could eat the raw right rump of General Sherman.’

She laughed, taking some more cans out of the shopping bag, and an unwrapped loaf of bread in an open paper sack. I picked up the bread. It was still warm. I smelled it in long slow deep inhalations, packing them tightly into every corner of my lungs. Good God! By what mysterious alchemy had my grandmother’s bread-baking secret been transmitted way out here? This had the same smell. The loaf was different and the color was different but this had the same smell. That thin little old lady humped over an oven …

‘It seems,’ Holiday was saying, ‘that there’s been a prison break.’

I looked around. She had spread a newspaper on the drainboard. I put down the loaf of bread and picked up the newspaper. We were still in the headlines, but this story contained more information. ‘New facts have come to light,’ it said. Toko had suddenly blossomed into a vicious criminal, a mad-dog killer, and was now ranked in the First Ten of public enemies. There was no longer any doubt about why he was trying to escape from the farm, the story went on. Two Illinois officers, properly and legally armed with extradition papers, were on their way to take him back to Illinois to face trial – and almost certain execution – for the hold-up murder of an aged shopkeeper.

Toko a murderer; that punk ranked in the First Ten, a mad-dog killer. I damn near laughed out loud.

‘Looks like they’re building him up for a personal appearance somewhere,’ I said. ‘I never read such a lot of junk in my life.’

‘Didn’t Toko ever tell you?’

‘Tell me what?’

‘That he was wanted for murder.’

Now I had to laugh. ‘Who the hell did he ever kill?’ I asked.

‘Didn’t he ever tell you who the hell he’d killed?’ she said.

‘Stop it,’ I said. ‘He was yellow. He had the heart of a humming bird. He quit cold on me. Half-way across the cantaloupe patch he quit cold. He was yellow. If he’d followed like I told him, he’d never been hit. He was yellow. That’s what caused him to get conked. Mad-dog killer, my butt…’

‘Why do you think he made his break with only ten months left to serve? They were coming to get him, that’s why. Do you think I’d’ve let him take a chance unless he had everything to gain and nothing to lose? Do I look like that much of a chump?’

‘All right,’ I said. ‘He was a killer. A very distinguished killer.’

‘Go on, be jealous,’ she said.

‘Jealous? Of him? That bum? That popcorn thief?’

She took a step towards me and in a sudden flinging motion she clawed at my face. I closed my eyes to protect them and slipped my head, jerking my knee up, slamming her in the crotch. She uttered a groan that had no edge, and the thought of where I had hit her made me feel faint in the stomach and the color of it was a sharp-pointed painful yellow, and I hurried out going to the bathroom, turning on the water in the basin and filling my cupped hands with it and dousing my face in it, and washing the taste of what had happened out of my mouth with it – and when I straightened up, Holiday was sitting on the edge of the tub.

‘Please, don’t be sore,’ she said.

I picked a hand towel off the wall rack and very carefully folded it into a wide strap and soaked it under the running water and then wrung it out and turned and slapped her across the face with it. I felt faint at the stomach again, but nothing like the faintness I had felt before.

‘Please, don’t be sore,’ she said.

I threw the towel into the tub and went out into the bedroom, drying my hands on my shorts.

Holiday drifted in, standing by the bed.

‘Please, don’t be sore,’ she said.

‘I forgive you,’ I said. ‘Now, what do you intend to do about Toko’s body?’

‘Intend to do about his body? What do you mean?’ she asked.

‘I mean you ought to claim it. You’re his next-of-kin. They got records of your visits to the farm. If they can’t get in touch with you they’re liable to think you’re mixed up in this.’

‘
Think
I’m mixed up in it?’ she said. ‘They know it. They know it already.’ She turned and went out of the room and in a minute she was back with one of the newspapers. ‘You better read this,’ she said, handing it to me. ‘Right there…’

I took the newspaper, looking where she was pointing. ‘...
Postal Inspectors have detained Bacon, the carrier who delivered mail to the Tokowanda girl’s apartment. He has confessed that he warned her when a letter from her brother in the prison camp was intercepted by the police.
’ I looked at her still holding the newspaper.

She said: ‘The minute the postman told me the cops had intercepted the letter I knew Toko was a goner unless I moved fast. I had a friend who knew Mason, the guy out here. He telephoned him and when I got here everything was arranged. My only problem was to get Toko away from the farm before the cops showed up with the extradition papers.’

‘You got nice friends,’ I said, dropping the newspaper on the floor. ‘The postman, the fellow in Chicago, Mason – Yes, sir. Not an enemy in the world.’

‘There you go getting jealous again,’ she said.

‘You’re nuts,’ I said. ‘I’m not jealous. I never saw you until two weeks ago and after tonight I’ll probably never see you again. You’re nuts.’

Her eyes narrowed a little and she took off the green-checkered coat and flung it over her shoulder with a cheap theatricality. Then with both hands she ripped off the shirt, pitching it, underhanded, into my face. I caught a fast faint flavor of woman-smell, and when I got the shirt from in front of my eyes she was unzippering her skirt, which she let fall to the floor. She wore no brassiere. She yanked at the top button of her shorts and kicked them clear over the bed. Then she moved a couple of steps in front of me, standing spreadlegged, her hands on her hips.

‘Tell me that again,’ she said. ‘Tell me you won’t be seeing me any more after tonight’

I stood up slowly and slapped her across the face. Her mouth popped open and then it closed and she fell across the bed, sobbing. I trembled then and the color of it was pink turning to red, and I fell across the bed, having the thought as I fell that she was right, she was absolutely right.

‘Look’ – I said, reaching to turn her over. ‘Look …’

She swallowed the rest of what I was trying to say, banging her mouth against mine, gnawing at my lips and dragging her hands across my bare shoulders. I could feel my skin piling up under her nails, and in the bathroom I could hear the water still running in the wash basin …

T
HE BUS WAS CROWDED
with people going to work. I dropped my dime into the fare box, moving to the rear, holding my lunch in the brown paper sack so that everybody could see I was on my way to work, too. I noticed that we were still on the front page, but the headlines went to the Navy disaster. The
Akron
had been beaten down in a storm off Barnegat, New Jersey, and seventy-three persons had been drowned, including the Aviation Chief, Rear Admiral W. A. Moffett. That was what everybody was reading and talking about. I had no use for the lunch wrapped in the brown paper sack.

I picked a corner to get off the bus where six or seven others also were getting off, going out in the middle of them starting down the street towards the garage as if I had been doing the same thing for years.

Jinx was in the office with Mason, waiting for me.

‘I’ll say one thing for you,’ Mason said. ‘You sure don’t waste a lot of time getting started.’

‘I want to get Holiday out of hock,’ I told him. I looked at Jinx. ‘You got everything?’

‘I’m set,’ Jinx said. ‘But I don’t think Mason is.’

I looked at Mason. There was a wise smile on his face and he made a point of stroking an imaginary beard. ‘I shaved ’em off last week,’ he said.

‘I don’t get it,’ I said.

‘The whiskers,’ he said. ‘Who do you think I am Santa Claus? Ten per cent and I furnish the car! You think this is a gravy train you’re riding?’

‘Is that what Jinx told you ten per cent?’ I asked, laughing. ‘He misunderstood me’

‘I didn’t misunderstand no such a damn thing,’ Jinx said. ‘You said ten per cent.’

‘I said
twenty-five
per cent, Jinx,’ I said, winking at him so that Mason could see, so that he would still think he had me over a barrel. ‘I said one-fourth to Mason for the use of the car.…’

‘That’s more like it,’ Mason said. ‘Now, what’s this about you not liking the color of the Zephyr?’

‘I don’t even like the Zephyr,’ I said, dropping my lunch package into his wastebasket. ‘It’s too conspicuous. I want a black Ford sedan with a Mercury motor. Exactly like the cops use…’

‘Well, now, ain’t it just too bad that you got to ride around in a Zephyr.…!’

‘I’ll ride around in the Zephyr for this one job,’ I said. ‘For just this one job. But arrange to get me a black Ford sedan with a Mercury motor. And eight or nine sets of out-of-state license plates.…’

‘Jesus,’ he exclaimed, shaking his head. ‘For a punk who’s flat on his can you sure talk big.’

I ignored him, turning to Jinx. ‘What about the guns?’

Jinx pointed to Mason. ‘He’s got ’em.’

‘I hear you don’t like a revolver,’ he said.

‘You know what I like,’ I said. ‘Get ’em.’ He stared at me for a moment, dubiously, and then opened the top drawer of the desk and picked up two blue-steel, bone-handled .380 Colt automatics. I took them, holding them in my hands, looking at them. I swung my hands up and down, feeling their weight, and then I put one down on the desk and sprung the clip from the other one, thumbing the cartridges into my palm, one by one. I tested the spring of the clip for tension. I put the cartridges back in, slipped the clip in the butt, and tested the other one. Then I looked at them again. They were flawless, precise, perfect as a circle is perfect.